F 74 

CI M25 
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ADDRESS 



ON 



SOME CAMBRIDGE MEN 
I HAVE KNOWN 

January 28, 1908 



BY 

ALEXANDER McKENZIE 



[Reprinted from Proceedings of The Cambridge 
Historical Societv, HI] 






SOME CAMBRIDGE MEN I HAVE KNOWN 

Me. Chairman : I should like to have it understood at the be- 
ginning that I am here to-night under protest; I am not at all 
responsible ; I refused and protested and never consented, — unless 
silence gives consent. I am especially sorry in regard to the 
subject that was given me, because it almost makes it obligatory to 
talk about myself. I have been asked to speak about some men 
whom I have known. It so happens that if a person lives a con- 
siderable time he comes to know a considerable number of people. 
That has been my lot, and I have been especially favored in the sort of 
people, or some of the people, whom I have known. I am some- 
what oppressed when I think of those with whom my own life has 
been brought in contact; when I remember that I came to Boston, 



20 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Jan. 

a boy, a stranger in this great city, — there was not a man in the 
city whom I knew except in the very slightest way, — and yet 
that I was permitted to know so many afterwards who have had an 
active part,- here in the college and in the country. 

What I shall say to-night, for I certainly must be limited, will 
relate almost entirely to the men whom I have known in Harvard 
College. The first great man I ever saw was John Quincy Adams. 
He came to New Bedford when I was a schoolboy, and the boys 
were allowed to shake hands with him. Then I came to Boston 
and was thrown into connection with one of the leading families of 
the city, the Lawrences, and with them spent four years. This has 
always been a mystery to me, that they really took me in. I had 
not been in their employ very long when the head of the firm, Mr. 
Samuel Lawrence, asked me to his house for a Christmas dinner. 
Why he selected me, the youngest boy in his employ, I do not 
know ; but there came to be a real friendship, and he came almost 
to 'be a father to me, — and that led on to other things. So when I 
came to college, very much against his remonstrance, it was in part 
through his instrumentality that I met the first eminent man of my 
college experience, the Honorable Edward Everett, whom I came 
to know very pleasantly, so far as a young man could, — becoming 
more than a guest, a friend even, in his house, — and whose acquaint- 
ance I enjoyed to the day of his death, and might have enjoyed to 
this day if he had lived. Of course that was due to the fact that 
his son William was my college chum, as he is my friend to this 
hour. Mr. Everett is most highly esteemed as scholar and orator, 
and statesman ; but when one came to be near him he was found a 
very generous and companionable man. I had many delightful 
hours in his house 1 I think you will agree with me that the 
easiest man to get along with is a gentleman. One whom we call 
a man of the people oftentimes does not know what to do and is 
very awkward in doing it ; but a gentleman you can depend on for 
his courtesy. Mr. Everett was one of the gentlest men I have ever 
known ; he never made a noise. I remember going upstairs behind 
him one day, and recall his saying: "Dr. Jackson says you must 
go upstairs slowly." That has been a lesson to me. There was 
nothing more impressive than to be with Mr. Everett at family 
prayers. He would stand and read the prayers with all the rever- 



immmmmsm^ 



1908.] SOME CAMBRIDGE MEN 21 

ence and dignity befitting that solemn service. He was a man of 
charming wit, with great resources in historical and personal inci- 
dents which came constantly to his mind, and which he was very 
glad to share with others. Now there is a point which I should 
like to make because I think it needs, possibly, to be recognized. 
Mr. Everett has always been called a cold man. It has been my 
fortune to know some of those cold men, who keep one at a dis- 
tance. They are as genial men as I have happened to encounter. 
They are not men with whom you take liberties. They are reserved 
towards those who intrude upon them ; but any one who has the 
slightest claim has found them very kind, very approachable men. 
Such at least has been my experience. 

When I was coming to college Mr. Everett suggested to me, 
what would have been presumptuous for a sub-freshman without 
some such introduction, that I should call upon the President. 
The President was by marriage a relative of JNIr. Everett. So I 
ventured to call upon him, and the President, I am very glad to 
remember, was James Walker. President Walker gave me a very 
kind, cordial reception, and that was my entrance, my first step 
into the college. There are those here to-night, I presume, who re- 
member Dr. Walker. A greater man has rarely Avalked the streets 
of Cambridge in this or any preceding generation. He was a man 
of very sturdy character. He was very lame, and walked with 
labor across the college yard. His hand was cramped and he had 
to hold his pen in his fist, and push it up and down in a very 
irregular style of writing. But his words told. His face was one 
of those strong, massive faces. His preaching was of that strong 
massive kind. 1 keep two volumes of his sermons at my hand 
now. I wish we had such preachers in these days. We get too 
little of that tremendous iron-bound truth which there is no p-ettino- 
away from. He was very decided in his ways. We did not often 
hear the President. But now and then he would lead the chapel 
service, and the fellows went out and talked about it. It was 
something to remember, to hear Dr. Walker read the Bible. He 
liked those dramatic passages. He had one gesture, a sort of up 
and down arrangement ; but that did not come into his reading. I 
can hear him read now: Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. Every 
fellow felt that he was in the scales, and that the scales were turn- 



22 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Jan. 

ing the wrong way. Then in preaching he would come out with 
some such thundering sentence as, " Young men, you have more 
need of religion than religion has of you ! " Yet a kind man he 
was, a courteous man, a man ever to be trusted. They had a report 
in the class before mine that he once preached a sermon on Honesty 
is the best policy, and proved it was not; but I think' that was a 
student misconception. He was, on the other hand, a very honest, 
straightforward man. I remember very well going to him one 
day. The faculty — it was not this faculty but another — made a 
rule that Class-day should be pushed up against Commencement. 
In my time we used to have Class-day and Commencement about 
three weeks apart, and the fellows who had parts were supposed to 
be writing them. I do not know what the others were supposed to 
be doing. Then the faculty put the two days near together, so that 
we lost that three weeks' recess. Well, we had a class meeting 
and remonstrated ; and they appointed a man who afterwards 
became a prominent Boston lawyer, Frank Balch, and myself a 
committee to wait on the President. We secured the interview 
and stated our case. Our principal argument was that if they 
moved Class-day they took it out of strawberry time, and what would 
Class-day be without strawberries ! I presume that the President 
saw the point. He heard all we had to say, and then quietly 
remarked : " Young gentlemen, your feeling is better than your 
argument." But he gave us what we asked for; they moved 
Commencement, and let Class-day stand. So we prevailed. He 
was that kind of man, — honest, steady, firm in his conviction, but 
with a warm, generous, obliging heart. He said to me one day 
after I came back here, " If I ever gave up being a Unitarian, 
which I cannot imagine, I should become a Methodist." He liked 
the Methodist spirit and emotion. That was in the old time ; 
Methodists seem to have given up much of that feeling, but they 
used to have a good deal of inspiring sound and glow ; they used 
to sing ; they do not sing in that way now, — they have quartette 
choirs. Dr. Walker knew the former days. 

The preacher who came to the college at the same time with my 
class was of a different type ; just as good a man as the President, 
but not so well fitted for his position. He was the most popular 
preacher in Boston, I think, when he came here ; but for some reason 



1908.] SOME CAMBRIDGE MEN 23 

he did not quite meet the student mind. He was not a graduate of 
Harvard, which was a misfortune, and he did not get into the Har- 
vard way. He was in a transition state ; nobody knew quite where he 
was coming out. He was rather fond of ritual, which the Harvard 
faculty disliked. He was fond of form in one way and another. 
The students said that he talked too much about sin. Perhaps he 
did. They said that he was wordy. He did drive a substantive and 
six, as they said of Rufus Cho9,te. But it was all very good ; and 
I think we never had a man here who cared more for our welfare 
than Dr. Huntington. You know if a man gets an unfortunate 
name in college he seldom loses it ; and Dr. Huntington made an 
error in the beginning. He called us together and sought our 
favor, and among other things said, " I have asked that I may not 
be required to join the faculty ; I want to stand outside as your 
friend." Well, we believed in that and rather liked it. Then 
presently he was in the faculty. The fellows never understood 
quite how he got there, what the change of mind was ; but it gave 
rise to one of those college prejudices which you cannot reason 
against. But he was one of the best of men. I think the hardest 
contest I had in college was for him. It came time to get the bacca- 
laureate preacher. We had a class meeting, and the class said the 
Plummer professor should not preach that sermon. I thought that 
he should, if I could bring it about. I made the best argument I 
could and was beaten, as I have been many times since. They said 
the President should preach the sermon. Dr. Walker was Avaited 
on, and he simply remarked, " Whoever happens to be preaching 
that day will preach that sermon." The Plummer professor preached 
it. I had my way after all, though it was gathering victory out of 
defeat. I have the greatest regard for Dr. Huntington. I think it 
was unfortunate that he was here, but no man was ever more faith- 
ful and loyal, and he did more in some ways than anybody else at 
that time. 

But the man who came after him — now I am down to your 
time — was a model man in many things, a man of great learning, 
a man of an immense heart. I have seldom known a man who had 
such a large heart as Dr. Andrew Peabody. It was big all through. 
I meet a great many men whom I respect when I go away from 
them more than I did when I came to them ; I do not think I ever 



24 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Jan. 

talked with Dr. Peabody that I did not think better of him ; but I 
thought better of myself, too. He had that way; I would tell 
him some little project I was going to carry out, some paper I was 
writing, and he would express his great pleasure, " I am so glad 
You are going to do that." I do not suppose he thought of it five 
minutes after, but still it helped me over the hard places. Kind ! 
You could not get him to do anything against a student if he knew 
that student's grandfather. He had a theory that a man might 
have two inheritances. He cited the case of a man who was living 
in the town here at that time who had been wild in his youth, but 
who turned around and became a very sober citizen. He said, 
" That man used his inheritance from his mother first ; that took 
him some years, and he ran through that ; then he took up his 
father, — it is his father you see now." The father was a minister 
of good standing. There was a great deal of wit in the Doctor. 
There was a great deal of severity when he was stirred up. I 
have rarely seen a man who could be more sarcastic. I once asked 
him about a minister who had come into this region, " Do you 
know him?" He said, "Yes, I do; he was a business man; 
he came to me and asked if he had better study for the min- 
istry. I told him, no. He took my advice, and went into the 
ministry without studying." He was somewhat uncertain for a 
time, as many were, over some things in the matter of evolu- 
tion, especially on that Simian line, whether we really do come from 
monkeys. He said in one of his sermons, I remember, " The best 
proof we have that men have come from monkeys is the desire of 
some men to prove that it is so." He confessed to me one day a 
certain relief he had received. It seems they wanted to put up a 
new building in our ward here and there was opposition to it, and 
a public hearing, and they got the old Doctor down to testify on 
one side or the other. A foolish thing ! The Doctor did not know 
anything about it, but he knew which side they wanted him to 
testify on. But there was an Irish alderman there who handled 
him, as they say, " without gloves " ; also used him very roughly 
and rudely. I saw the Doctor shortly after, and he said, " I have 
been in doubt about this matter of evolution, about our coming 
from monkeys. My mind is clear now ; I have found the connect- 
ing link; it is an alderman from East Cambridge." Well, that 



190S-] SOME CAMBRIDGE MEN 25 

was the sort of thing he could say ; and yet he would be so kind, 
so patient, so generous. I have one or two letters from him that I 
should think v^^ere extravagant if I did not know the sober mind 
which was back of them. I think, on the whole, the most touch- 
ing thing I ever heard from the Doctor was a paper he read at our 
ministers' club upon the internal evidence for the authorship of the 
Gospel of St. John, — that St. John wrote it. It was a delightful 
paper, and one point which he made was, that it was written by an 
old man. Dr. Peabody, I think, then was over eiglity. He said, 
" There is this peculiarity about an old man : he notices little 
things. Now you read that Gospel and compare it with the others 
and you find it is full of httle things." I cannot give the in- 
stances now, but you will remember that some were drawn out in 
detail. He might have used, for example, the Cana of GaUlee 
incident. A young man would have said, " There were some stone 
water-jars there." The old man said, " There were six of them 
and they would hold about two or three firkins apiece." Again, 
by the Sea of Galilee, a young man would say, " They brought in 
the nets with lots of fishes." There the old man would say, " There 
were a hundred and fifty-three fishes, and big ones, too." This 
course of argument, coming from this old man who said he remem- 
bered the past now a great deal better than he did when younger, 
became very impressive. A very rare, very choice character ! I 
almost pity anybody who never knew Dr. Peabody. It seems there 
must be something wanting in his life. He was not graceful. He 
was reported to have said that he saw no good in going to dancing 
school ; he never went. Tliere was no reason to suppose he had 
gone. But his mind worked clearly, distinctly, and beautifully. 
He was a man long to be reraembei-ed. 

I began, I tliink, about the President. Let me pass on to the 
President who came after Dr. Walker. It was after my time ; my 
whole college course was spent under Dr. Walker; and I am 
grateful for that. But the President who followed was a professor 
in my day, Professor Felton. We have recently heard an admi- 
rable account of the man and his life from Professor Goodwin, and 
I need not speak of him at any length. Those here who remember 
him recall a man whose very presence was full of gladness and beauty. 
A large man, a jolly man, with curly hair and a smiling face. I 



26 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Jan. 

know at the Phi Beta dinners we always expected something funny 
from Professor Felton. He was not a great teacher, at least 
according to ray standard. He undertook to read Demosthenes 
with us but I think there was something wanting. I do not think 
we entered into the spirit of Demosthenes as we might have done 
if he had made us dig things out for ourselves. But he was 
wonderfully popular. I remember very well our last recitation to 
him It had been the custom after the last recitations to cheer the 
professors. There was naturally a good deal of discrimination about 
it and the faculty noticed that we did not cheer men equally, but 
one more than another; so they attempted to stop the whole thing, 
and they voted there should be no more of that cheering of the 
professors. They wanted to protect the men who did not get the 
applause. The Professor told us this as we went down under 
Harvard Hall, and it must have been G. Lawrence who called out, 
« Three cheers for Corny Felton !" We cheered him ; and nobody 
enjoyed it more than he did, I think, if the sound went up into 
his ears, and brought out that beautiful smile which we knew 

so well. 

In Greek we were singularly off, if I speak of men I knew. It 
was pretty hard upon us freshmen to be thrown upon Sophocles. 
Sophocles was a Greek right through. It was a current mystery 
whether he was a monk, or soldier, or what. He was evidently a 
Greek. He knew everything, that was understood; and he was 
very quiet, as he walked about the streets with his head down, 
meditating something. But in the recitation room it was simply 
an impossibility to move with assurance. No matter how well you 
got your lesson, he would take you off on some track you never 
dreamed of. He would mislead a student; he would give a cue 
which the poor fellow would follow and get into trouble. " Is 
thatverbin the second aorist?" "Yes, sir." "It is not." And 
he had one question, relating to something in Greece, — I do not 
remember quite the point, something in regard to an old temple 
and its fallen columns. " Why is that so ? How do you account 
for that? " Well, the fellow had never heard of the thing, and he 
gave a guess. "No, that is not it." The fellow who tried next 
without success varied the guess. Another was inquired of. " No, 
no ; what is the reason for that. " " I do not know, sir. " " That is 



1908] SOME CAMBRIDGE MEN 27 

right, nobody knows." I think that particular adventure was not 
tried in my class, but he would lead us along a good deal in that 
way. He was in some ways a very good tutor. There was a 
custom in that day that if you lived under a tutor you were liable 
to be called on at any time for his errands. He had only to stamp 
on the floor and you had to go up and do whatever he told you. 
It was my luck to live under Sophocles, but never in the whole 
3^ear did he stamp on the floor. He once came and tapped on my 
door, and when I went there he said in his solemn way, " I should 
like to see Bailey, if it is convenient ; if not, no matter." Well, 
I did what I ought not to have done ; I should not do it now ; I 
called Bailey. What the result was I do not know, but that is the 
only application I ever had from Sophocles to do anything of that 
sort. When I returned to Cambridge, as I did after a little absence, 
I knew Sophocles very well. He was a delightful man to meet 
anywhere, in his room, on the street. It was pleasant to ask him 
questions. I remember there was a Greek word which, profession- 
ally, I had some occasion to consider ; and there was some dispute 
about its meaning; and walking down Garden Street one day I 
said, "Mr. Sophocles, what does that word mean?" He said- 
" What does Epiphanius say ? " That did not help me, for I did not 
know what Epiphanius said. He went on and expanded it, how- 
ever, and I found that I agreed with what he said. I have always 
felt a little braver, for I hold the same opinion still, and if anybody 
disputes me, I have Epiphanius behind me. I believe Sophocles' 
chief diversion was keeping hens, which he quartered on some 
neighbor's premises. You see that Sophocles was a pretty difficult 
man to get on with as a teacher, especially for innocent, unsuspi- 
cious freshmen. I had never read a line of lyric Greek poetry 
until I came here for examination. To be tlu-own suddenly into 
the Alcestis of Euripides was a little violent. Somehow I came 
through. Then we were thrown into the hands of a magnificent 
scholar, with all the learning of Germany in his brain. His name 
was Goodwin. He was commonly known as John Goodwin. I do 
not know why. I think that we all liked him. I believe it was 
the Ajax which we read with him. We had difficulty with the 
play. The text was corrupt ; but, corrupt or pure, it was a great 
deal too much for us ; and Goodwin's hobby was to give us some 



28 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTOEICAL SOCIETY [Jan. 

other text, to amend that we had. Now for fellows who could 
not manage one, it was worse than superfluous to give us two or 
three more. But we came through, and had great and abiding 
respect for our teacher. I hope it will be a very great while before 
his epitaph is written, but one of my class wrote an epitaph as we 
were sitting there one day and he was giving his versions of the 
text. Dr. Huntington, now at Grace Church, New York, the witty 
man of our class, drew a gravestone and wrote this inscription : 

Here lies tutor G. ; read his epitaph straight, 

Let no word, line nor letter be needing; 
For should you make e'en the slightest mistake, 

He will rise and propose the true reading. 

That is the way in which we learned Greek. If we pass over 
to other departments we had various experiences. There was no 
man more generally beloved and trusted, no man more learned in 
his own department, than Asa Gray. I esteemed him very highly 
then, and afterwards as a parishioner. But, like other men, he was 
not very successful as a teacher of undergraduates. Those men, 
they knew so much they could not understand how it was that 
we knew so little. If we had been proficient, with some enthusiasm 
over Botany, which was a required study, we might have done better. 
The only thing I remember learning was the difference between en- 
dogenous and exogenous. I think I have still the substance of the 
distinction. But the courtesy of the man ! He would call on a poor 
fellow who would not know anything on the subject of liis inquiry 
and whose remarks were inaccurate. But there was no sneer, no re- 
buke. " Allow me to pass that " ; and the student, not to be out- 
done in courtesy, would allow him to pass it. That was the end, 
except it might have been noticed in the marks. We had marks in 
those days. Apparently he was fond of argument. If you find a 
quiet man you will generally find a combatant underneath. The blus- 
tering man is apt to be a coward. Some of you may remember 
Gray's dispute with Agassiz. He was very much displeased with a 
popular lecturer who was around here after my college time, a Har- 
vard man with the name of Joseph Cook. Cook's folly or foible was 
omniscience ; he knew everything. When he talked on science he 
made a bad piece of work of it. Dr. Gray was offended and com- 
plained to me about it. I did not know much about the matter. 



1908.] SOME CAMBRIDGE MEN 29 

After a time this lecturer struck theology, and made as bad work 
of that as he did of science. I met the Professor one day and said, 
*' Dr. Gray, I see now what has troubled you about Cook." " Ah, 
yes, yes, you see now, you see now," he said. I think there must 
be some here who remember seeing him going up the street with 
the Uttle dog behind him, in a quiet, meditative way. He had a 
present of botanical specimens from a man in Maine ; 1 think his 
name was Sparrow. When Dr. Gray wanted to acknowledge it, 
he had lost the letter, but he remembered the name was the name of 
a bird, and sent his acknowledgment to Mr. Swallow; it was in 
the same department, so it did not make much difference. He had 
the honor, so it is said, — I suppose it is correct, — of settling the 
question of priority between Darwin and Wallace. It was disputed 
which of them gave his great theory first. It so happened that 
Darwin had written a letter which Dr. Gray was able to produce, 
and which settled that question. He was a man that would give 
you a great deal in a small compass. About the time that evolu- 
tion was first talked about, he knew what authority I would ap- 
peal to, as a minister, and to prove that evolution was true, he 
referred me to the book of Genesis, and said, " There it is way back 
there." There it was. People had not generally appealed to that 
authority. They had looked down among birds, and bugs, and 
plants. He knew that would not appeal to me ; he went back to 
the creation. While I was talking with him one day, speaking of 
a lecturer who had amazed his hearers because he knew so much 
more than other people and had a right to know more, for he had 
seen through an immense telescope, nobody in the audience had 
seen such a big telescope as that man had seen through, and they 
sat there thinking. That man must be telling the truth, because 
he has seen through a bigger telescope than we have. Dr. Gray 
said to me, " That man does not see a single thing through that 
telescope that you cannot see standing on this sidewalk." At once 
I saw that it was so. He could see a little further and see more 
things ; he could not discover a single astronomical principle with 
any religious bearing that a boy on the sidewalk could not discover. 
I was very fond of Dr. Gray ; I treasure his memory ; and that 
beautiful verse which was written of him by Mr. Lowell is emi- 
nently true when it speaks of his indefatigable days, and prays 



30 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Jan. 

that they may be prolonged, — days which are as gayly innocent 
and fragrant as his flowers. You notice that Lowell said his 
flowers, not the flowers. They said of Dr. Gray, that if he took up 
a bunch of flowers they would fall into their places naturally, they 
loved him so. It is possible that is an exaggeration, but it shows 
the spirit of the man. I do believe there is some affinity between 
men and flowers. At any rate, they have the same life, and why 
should they not work together ? 

Mathematics ! Shall I say a word about it ? The class 
was divided into two parts. Half of it was given to a man 
popularly known as Jimmy Peirce, and the other half to a man 
known as Eliot. He was connected with the college afterwards 
in another capacity, — I believe that he is now. I came under 
Charles W. Eliot, — a beautiful teacher, clear, accurate, just as 
he is now ; very kind, very helpful, very considerate. We not 
only learned geometry, analytical geometry, trigonometry, and 
such things from him, but he took a squad of us out to survey. 
We surveyed the whole college yard, put every tree in its place 
very carefully, and all the buildings, with their ins and outs. I 
think the only place which baffled us was that curve around by 
Plarvard Square. I think I was on that part. We had to appeal 
to him to get the curve drawn as it was. But we made such a 
good map that the corporation accepted it, and thanked us for it. 
Then from him we went up to the greatest of all mathematicians, 
Benjamin Peirce. If it is any fun to see a man stand before the 
blackboard and cover it with Japanese or Chinese or some other 
characters you cannot understand, we had that satisfaction. He 
spent the morning amusing himself at the blackboard. We used 
to follow along a little while, all of us together, and then one 
pencil would drop, then another, and another, and by and by 
the last man had given in. He gave us some problems to work 
out, and he gave us beautiful curves to draw ; but the only thing 
really practical which I got from him was a formula which one day 
he put upon the blackboard in his simple, childlike way. " That 
formula," he said, "is the one by which the universe was con- 
structed, — by which every conceivable universe must be con- 
structed." I took it down ; I have not had occasion to use it, but 
whenever I am called upon to create a universe I shall use that 



1908.] SOME CAMBRIDGE MEN 31 

formula. 1 believe it is the only practical thing I brought out of 
that recitation room. 

We were favored in a good many ways ; but we were badly used 
in some, very badly used in philosophy. We had a man abun- 
dantly able to teach us, Professor Bovven, but he, at the time he 
should have been teaching us, went to Europe, and we were left. 
Political economy and mental philosophy were combined at that 
time. Political economy consisted principally, so far as we went, 
I think, in refuting Malthus. Why we wanted to refute Mai thus 
I do not know, but we did it satisfactorily. That is about all I 
learned except one other point, that " the presumption is in favor 
of existing institutions." That is all gone by now ; the presump- 
tion at present is not in favor of existing institutions ; it is in 
favor of different ones, — variety, change, novelty are most attrac- 
tive. They are termed progress and advance, and sometimes 
they are. 

We ought to have enjoyed Professor Bowen ; he was a fine 
scholar, and a fine writer of English. I am still sorry that he 
went abroad when he did. But there was a man here in some 
respects one of the most remarkable in college, the one who could 
teach" everything. There were some men who could teach two 
things. I had this teacher in at least five different departments, — 
I am not sure but there were six ; there are five I recall at this 
moment. Whenever anybody went away they put him in ; we had 
him in Philosophy and in Political Economy, and Forensics ; and in 
Elocution, Orthoepy, History. At the end of the week for half an 
hour, or possibly two half hours, we used to have the President ; 
but that did not amount to much, there was so little of it. It was 
too bad that we were used as we were ; I think if we could have 
had President Walker right along I might now have been able to 
understand Josiah Royce, and might have reached some tolerable 
height or some tolerable depth in philosophy. 

Tliere was no man whom we hked better or respected more than 
the professor of History; a pure, delicate man, sensitive as a 
woman ! How quick he was I How he would blush at some little 
thino- ! Professor Torrey was an eminent teacher ; he was a teacher 
before he came here. He taught us the policies and politics of 
modern Europe, and many other things that have stayed by me to 



32 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Jak. 

this day, which is a great deal to say of things you learn in college. 
I had a special acquaintance with him. There was a man in New 
Bedford when I was a boy known as Governor Swain ; he was the 
governor of the Island of Naushon. His boy was out of health, 
and the doctor advised the father to take his boy to the Azores, 
and they took Mr. Torrey along as a tutor. It so happened that 
they embarked on the ship of which my father was the captain ; 
and when I came to college Professor Torrey was kind enough to 
remember that, and I think he always treated me with some special 
courtesy because of that voyage he had made with my father. He 
gave us delightful lectures. I said to him not long before he died, 
" I wish you would print those lectures." He said, " No ; they 
were well enough then, but that sort of work has been done by 
many people since." The lectures were fresh and instructive, and 
charmed us who heard them. 

I do not know that there was any man from whom I got more 
practical help than from Professor Child. He was a man we all 
liked. We read Chaucer, Anglo-Saxon, with him and studied 
Whately and Campbell; but the great thing he did was correct- 
ino; our themes. He was frank and honest. He gave the most 
remarkable subjects. Nobody had heard of them before. " When 
the people of Crete, in times past, had a man to curse any one, 
they prayed the gods to involve him in some evil habit." I think 
that was the first theme, and it was a sample of the rest. The 
first feeling you had when he gave out the subject was, I don't 
know anything about that. But before the time came around 
there had to be something written. The theme went in on fair 
white paper, and came back decorated ; with red marks sometimes 
drawn across a whole page to show how much he liked it. Some- 
times a short sentence ran along some fine piece of work, " What 
of it?" When a fellow had expended his whole nature on a 
passage, there would be a single word on the margin in blue pencil, 
— "Bosh," You never forgot that; and I think the writers of 
that time excelled in clearness and strength of style. He was 
very fond of Anglo-Saxon ; very fond of illustration. I have 
heard a fellow say, " I shall get a good mark this time ; I have 
put in a simile"; he thought a simile was worth at least five. 
We learned a great deal from him in that simple and direct way. 



1908.] SOME CAMBRIDGE MEN 33 

As I have had to talk a great deal since, I think it has stayed hy 
me better even than that formula for constructing the universe. 
It has been of more practical use • I cannot say what the future 
may bring. 

In Science we did not do a great deal. We had Professor 
Lovering in Physics. We used to think he overworked the paralel- 
logram of forces, but perhaps he did not. He was an easy teacher. 
We kept our books open while the recitation was going on ; that 
is, not when we were called on to recite, but up to that moment. 
There was no concealment about it. We were called in order, 
and you could very easily keep along with the text, so that it was 
easy to recite. The experiments were interesting, though some- 
what monotonous. The great thing that distinguished him was his 
perfect coolness, calm, undisturbed, imperturbable. I remember 
one day the black assistant was pumping water through a rubber 
hose up into a high tank. I do not know whether it was mischief 
or not, but that hose gradually rose up, and came around and 
struck Professor Lovering in the back of the neck. There was no 
anger, no passion. In a very courteous voice he asked Clary what 
he was doing. He was reported in one of his electric experiments 
to have sent off a spark and to have very quietly remarked, " If 
that had gone through me I should have been a corpse." He had 
a college catalogue of the sort we used to have, a very thin, blue 
book, and he sent an electric spark through it, making a hole 
about as large as a cambric needle, and passed it down to the 
students. One of them took out his knife and enlarged the aper- 
ture until it was about as large as a cent. It was not satisfactory 
any longer as proof on that particular point and was called in. 
He was not quite the prophet. His lectures were largely on elec- 
tricity. I think of his pronouncement : " This is very pretty as 
you see it here ; there have been some attempts to make a practical 
use of it, but nothing has been effected. " I wish he could come 
back and ride on a trolley car and hang on a strap. He would 
have no further doubt of its practical usefulness. 

Professor Cooke in Chemistry was a fine lecturer, a good 
teacher, but that was about the whole of it. We had no laboratory 
work, except a man here and there. The only experiment I re- 
member we ever tried ourselves — I never tried it, but it was tried 

3 



34 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Jan. 

down here in the Bakery, where I was hving — was to make, in a 
vial, sulphuretted hydrogen, and send it, by a glass tube, through 
another fellow's keyhole, the result of which would resemble the 
fragrance of an egg which has outlived its usefulness. The Pro- 
fessor was reported to have said that he knew a smell worse than 
that, but he never told us what it was. 

I am taking your time too long. Many more of these men I 
could talk about if there were time. We had Professor Agassiz a 
little ; we had Professor Jeffries Wyman a little ; we had Professor 
Lowell. But Mr. Lowell's lectures, as we heard them, were not 
exactly suited to the student taste. The course he gave us was 
on the English poets, minor poets, — Pollok's Course of Time, 
Young's Night Thoughts, etc. I dare say there were fellows 
like Frank Hopkinson and Frank Abbot in the class who enjoyed 
them, but to most of us they were not appealing. But two sen- 
tences have stayed in my mind, though I have forgotten so many 
better things. He characterized this Uterature in this way : " When 
we read these poems, we feel as when we see a mastodon, that they 
are fearfully and wonderfully made, but we are glad the breed 
is extinct;" and somewhat more cutting was his summing up: 
*' Wishy-washy stuff, where the big words go floundering about 
like bones in a charity soup, which, so far from adding anything to 
the flavor, only suggest unpleasant comparisons." Still, it was 
something to see Mr. Lowell ; something, certainly, to know him 
in the familiarity which came after student life was over. What a 
delightful man he was to those who came, as I never did, close to 
him in his own study of Italian! I think one of the brightest 
remarks of Mr. Howells related to his coming back after he had 
left Cambridge and again meeting Mr. Lowell. It was not the 
same thing, he said. And he made that wonderfully suggestive 
remark, " He had lost the habit of me." There is nothing finer 
than that. It was very fine when he was a neighbor to sit down 
and read Italian, but " He had lost the habit of me " ; and one 
has to come into that habit. I met Mr. Lowell when he came back 
from Spain in Sever's bookstore. We had a word or two, and he 
came over to the other side of the shop to speak to me. " It is a 
little hard," he said, " when one comes back to his own country 
and in the University Bookstore has a man say to him, ' Will I do 
this up, sir, or shall I send it.' " 



1908.] SOME CAMBRIDGE MEN 35 

I think I have talked about all the men I should talk about at 
this hoiu". I do not make any comparisons ; I suppose there is 
more information in the faculty to-day than there was in my time ; 
there ought to be after these years of study. Yet, if I express any 
doubt, it is because you cannot tell exactly what is going to last. 
It is not very long ago that Herbert Spencer was a great name in 
Cambridge. Professor James has recently spoken of him in very 
uncomplimentary terms. Now what is to become of men who gave 
up their philosophy for Herbert Spencer, and are told that his 
philosophy is a wooden system, " as if knocked together out of 
cracked hemlock boards," and that his claim to renown rests on the 
fact that his heart was in the right place philosophically. Perhaps 
it was ; what we want is for his philosophy to be right. So I am 
a little uncertain what is going to last. There are very fine schol- 
ars here. There is more teaching than in my time. Younger men 
possibly come at times closer to younger men. I do not know 
but there are as many men who are looked up to as there were in 
my day, but we old fellows cannot quite see that. There are just 
as good men here, but I recall the feeling with which we looked 
up to Louis Agassiz, the most magnificent man I ever looked upon, 
I thought. It was fine just to hear him, to see him draw pictures on 
the blackboard ! There are such men here now ; I am very far 
from intimating that there are not ; but I may be pardoned my 
admiration for the sages of the olden days. I long ago found 
there is more to be learned from men than from books, a great 
deal more, and that it makes more difference who the teacher is 
than what the study is, and that to be in the presence of a man 
who has succeeded, really and truly, in making a great life, is a 
help and a liberal education. I am glad to the bottom of my sub- 
consciousness that I spent four years under James Walker ; I feel 
his influence, his blessing, his presence to-day. Great men they 
were, and they proved it by great lives. It was given to me to be 
associated with many great men. I had hardly come back here 
as a minister before I went into the board of overseers; then I 
was made secretary of the board, so that I stayed in and outhved 
everybody there except the president. For those years, thirty 
years nearly, that association was an education. They did not 
teach theology or discuss it_, but I saw there great men, men 



36 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Jan. 

of affairs. I sat side by side with Charles Francis Adams, and 
Judge Hoar, and Solomon Lincoln, and for almost thirty years 
face to face with President Eliot. It was a school for me, a school 
for the ministry, a school where one learns those lessons which can 
be changed and applied whatever be the way of his life. 

There is one other association with the men of my time, — that 
is with the men of my own class. I suppose all well-informed 
people admit that of the last century the two great college classes 
were '29 and '59. '69 men all feel that, at any rate. I think we 
have done our part in the world ; that we have given, perhaps, our 
share of men who have done good work for their fellow men. Bet- 
ter than all our sharing of study was our sharing of life. Tliere 
is nothing like a college friendship. I believe, more and more, that 
there is nothing in the world that is so well worth keeping as 
friendship, and I am pained when 1 see how friends drift apart 
when the very wealth of life is in this fellowshii^ of hearts. Our 
college friendships do last ; they have lasted in my own class ; and 
if we could sing to-night our college song, I think there is hardly 
a man of the class who could sing it without a tremble in the voice 
and a tear in the eye. I wish Sam Langmaid were here ; I would 
ask him to sing it : — 

" Heart to heart, boys, hand to hand, boys, 
Stand we members of the class of '59." 



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